Maille Massacre being investigated

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A German prosecutor was visiting a French village Tuesday to try to uncover secrets about one of the most vicious massacres perpetrated on French soil during the Second World War.

As the world rejoiced at the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation on Aug. 25, 1944, mere hours to the southwest, German troops were committing a horrific atrocity in Maillé. An estimated 80 soldiers entered the village of 600 in the Loire Valley, and that morning killed 124 residents, including 46 children under age 14 and 42 women.

Seven of the victims were shot. The rest were bludgeoned, bayoneted and burned to death.

The village was then bombed until it was in ruins.

Survivors later found a handwritten message on several corpses: "This is punishment for terrorists and their assistants."

Massacre's cause a mystery

Six decades later, it is not clear exactly what prompted the outburst.

German soldiers might have been reacting to an attack on them the previous day by French resistance fighters north of the village. Local residents were also known to be safeguarding an American pilot who had crash-landed in the area.

And six decades later, only one person has ever been held accountable for the atrocity. In 1952, a former German army lieutenant, Gustav Schlueter, was tried by France in absentia and found guilty. He remained at large in Germany until his death in 1965.

The Maillé massacre was the second-worst in France during the war, coming two months after an SS company killed 642 villagers in Oradour-sur-Glane, to the south.

But it has remained largely unknown to history, with many questions unanswered: Who were the other soldiers who partook in the slayings? Did Schlueter order the killings by his Wehrmacht company, or was the local SS branch involved as well? Why such cruelty?

"Maillé is the forgotten massacre. It has been completely overlooked by France, which preferred to celebrate Paris's liberation," historian Sébastien Chevereau told Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper.

A good part of the incentive to examine the incident has been lost in France, which has a statute of limitations of 30 years for war crimes. Not so in Germany, which has no such limits and which could still bring any living perpetrators to justice.

So on Tuesday, Ulrich Maas, a German prosecutor from Dortmund, began a weeklong visit to the village, trying to unearth the facts from crimes committed generations ago.

Along with two other investigators, Maas was scheduled to question survivors about which German troops were in the community on that day in 1944 and about where they were stationed.

French gendarmes have pitched in, interviewing 60 people about their recollections. Maas's team will also go over French archives to try to piece together Germany's troop movements in the summer of 1944.

Documents shed light on case

The Maillé massacre remained shrouded in historical anonymity for so long because so little was known about it.

In 1988, the United Nations unveiled a trove of war-crimes documents that shed light on the case, but German authorities were still hobbled by a lack of evidence and closed their investigation in 1990.

Then, in 2004, Maas read about the killings in a newspaper and undertook to seize what will likely be the last chance to bring the aging perpetrators to justice.

"We would like to know which troops did this and why," Maillé resident Serge Martin, whose parents, brother and sister were killed in the slaughter, told Agence France-Presse.

"We would like to be able to tell the truth to our youth. Not a day goes by that I don't think about Aug. 25, 1944, and the massacre of my family."
Corrections and Clarifications

CORRECTIONS:
* During the Second World War, the massacre at Maillé was the second-worst in France, not the second-worst by France as was originally reported.

MAILLE, France (AP) — For most of France, Aug. 25, 1944, was the joyous day that Allied troops liberated Paris from the Nazis. For this village in the Loire valley, it was a day of horror.

Retreating German troops massacred 124 of Maille's 500 residents then razed the town, possibly in retaliation for Resistance action in the region, according to local archives. Forty-four children were among the dead, the youngest just 4 months old.

Now a German investigator is drawing new attention to the forgotten chapter of World War II. Dortmund prosecutor Ulrich Maass began a three-day visit to Maille on Tuesday to interview survivors and dig through archives as part of his probe into the killings.

"I am ashamed about what the Germans did here, and I apologize," Maass told townspeople.

Mauricette Garnier, who was 9 at the time, recalled that when local people heard gunfire that day, many initially thought it was part of the celebrations as news traveled from Paris about the liberation.

Her mother and two brothers were among those slain in the village.

"I saw them slit the throat of my 20-month-old brother, and kill my mother at close range," she said. "I will never forgive. This inquiry comes much too late."

A Nazi officer, Gustav Schlueter, was convicted in absentia for his role in the killings by a military court in Bordeaux in 1952. Maass, who has been investigating the case since 2004, said Schlueter died at home in Germany in 1965. Other soldiers' roles remain unclear.

Philippe Varin, prosecutor in the nearby French city of Tours, said Maass and a police superintendent from the German city of Stuttgart would have help from French gendarmes as they try to identity Nazi units and any individuals with a role in the massacre.

He said it was "the first time a German judicial delegation has come on French soil to carry out investigations into war crimes."

In Germany, it is not unusual for investigators to probe crimes going back to Nazi days. In one current case, German prosecutors plan to seek the extradition of alleged former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk from the United States to prosecute him on charges that he was involved in killing Jewish prisoners at the Sobibor death camp.

Any suspects in the Maille case could be charged with murder — the only World War II-era crime on which the statute of limitations has not elapsed in Germany.

Townspeople have long said retaliation was the motive for the attack, and Maass said that was his main hypothesis. Claude Daumin, who was 10 at the time, said the event that triggered the massacre was the killing of an SS officer and his driver by local Resistance fighters.

"For 64 years, everybody knows what happened — these were reprisals," he said. "And they are saying so only now. It doesn't do any good."

The massacre in Maille was the second worst atrocity in Nazi-occupied France, after the Germans killed 642 men, women and children at Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10, 1944 — four days after the D-Day landings in Normandy.

Maille was rebuilt after the war, but Oradour-sur-Glane remains a phantom village, with burned-out cars and abandoned buildings left as testimony to its history. The town's fate is widely taught in French schools, while Maille's has largely been forgotten.

"You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of books that mention the massacre in Maille," said historian Sebastien Chevereau, who runs Maille's museum and archives. Now, "at least, the suffering of the inhabitants is being recognized."